action, formerly viewed as the only artistic possi-

bility of the film; henceforth appeared as a special

technique. The screen actor is not governed by the
stage, nor by the conventions of the theater; he has
his own realm and conventions; indeed, there may
be no "actor" at all. The documentary film is a
pregnant invention. The cartoon does not even
involve persons merely "behaving."
The fact that the moving picture could develop
to a fairly high degree as a silent art, in which
speech had to be reduced and concentrated into
brief, well-spaced captions, was another indication
that it was not simply drama. It used pantomime,
and the first aestheticians of the film considered it
as essentially pantomime. But it is not pantomime;
it swallowed that ancient popular art as it swal-
lowed the photograph.
One of the most striking characteristics of this
new art is that it seems to be omnivorous, able to
assimilate the most diverse materials and turn them
into elements of its own. With every new invention
- montage, the sound track, Technicolor - its de-
votees have raised a cry of fear that now its "art"
must be lost. Since every such novelty is, of course,
promptly exploited before it IS even technically
perfected, and flaunted in its rawest state, as
a popular sensation, in the flood of meaningless
compositions that steadily supplies the show busi-
ness, there is usually a tidal wave of particularly bad
rubbish in association with every important ad-
vance. But the art goes on. It swallows everything:
Susanne K. Langer, "A Note on the Film," Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a
New Key (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 411-15.
Susanne K. Langer
Here is a new art. For a few decades it seemed like
nothing more than a new technical device in the
sphere of drama, a new way of preserving and
retailing dramatic performances. But today its de-
velopment has already belied this assumption. The
screen is not a stage, and what is created in the
conception and realization of a film is not a play. It
is too early to systematize any theory of this new
art, but even in its present pristine state it exhibits
- quite beyond any doubt, I think - not only a new
technique, but a new poetic mode.
Much of the material for the following reflec-
tions was collected by four of my former seminar
students,
1
a,t Columbia Teach~rs College, who
have kindly permitted me to use their findings.
I am likewise indebted to Mr Robert W. Sowers,
who (also as a member of that seminar) made a
study of photography that provided at least one
valuable idea, namely that photographs, no matter
how posed, cut, or touched up, must seemfactual,
or as he called it, "authentic." I shall return later
to that suggestion.
The significant points, for my purposes, that
were demonstrated by the four collaborating mem-
bers were (l) that the structure of a motion picture
is not that of drama, and indeed lies closer to
narrative than to drama; and (2) that its artistic
potentialities became evident only when the mov-
ing camera was introduced.
The moving camera divorced the screen from the
stage. The straightforward photographing of stage
I
) ~.
l
Susanne K. Langer
dancing, skating, drama, panorama, cartooning,
music (it almost always requires music).
Therewithal it remains a poetic art. But it is not
any poetic art we have known before; it makes the
primary illusion - virtual history - in its own
mode.
This is, essentially, the dream mode. I do not
mean that it copies dream, or puts one into a
daydream. Not at all; no more than literature
invokes memory, or makes us believe that we are
remembering. An art mode is a mode of appearance.
Fiction is "like" memory in that it is projected to
compose a finished experiential form, a "past" -
not the reader's past, nor the writer's, though the
latter may make a claim to it (that, as well as the
use of actual memory as a model, is a literary
device). Drama is "like" action in being causal,
creating a total imminent experience, a personal
"future" or Destiny. Cinema is "like" dream in
the mode of its presentation: it creates a virtual
present, an order of direct apparition. That is the
mode of dream.
The most noteworthy formal characteristic of
dream is that the dreamer is always at the center
of it. Places shift, persons act and speak, or change
or fade - facts emerge, situations grow, objects
come into view with strange importance, ordinary
things infinitely valuable or horrible, and they may
be superseded by others that are related to them
essentially by feeling, not by natural proximity.
But the dreamer is always "there," his relation is,
so to speak, equidistant from all events. Things
may occur around him or unroll before his eyes; he
may act or want to act, or suffer or contemplate;
but the immediacy of everything in a dream is the
same for him.
This aesthetic peculiarity, this relation to things
perceived, characterizes the dream mode: it is this
that the moving picture takes over, and whereby
it creates a virtual present. In its relation to the
images, actions, events, that constitute the story,
the camera is in the place of the dreamer.
But the camera is not a dreamer. We are usually
agents in a dream. The camera (and its comple-
ment, the sound track) is not itself in the picture.
It is the mind's eye and nothing more. Neither is
the picture (if it is art) likely to be dreamlike in its
structure. It is a poetic composition, coherent,
organic, governed by a definitely conceived feel-
ing, not dictated by actual emotional pressures.
The basic abstraction whereby virtual history is
created in the dream mode is immediacy of experi-
ence, "givenness," or as Mr. Sowers calls it, "au-
thenticity." This is what the art of the film
abstracts from actuality, from O\lractual dreaming.
The percipient of a moving picture sees with
the camera; his standpoint moves with it, his mind
is pervasively present. The camera is his eye (as
the microphone is his ear - and there is no reason
why a mind's eye and a mind's ear must always
stay together). He takes the place of the dreamer, but
in a perfectly objectified dream - that is, he is not
in the story. The work is the appearance of a
dream, a unified, continuously passing, significant
apparition.
Conceived in this way, a good moving picture is
a work of art by all the standards that apply to
art as such. Sergei Eisenstein speaks of good and
bad films as, respectively, "vital" and "lifeless,,2;
speaks of photographic shots as "elements,,,3 which
combine into "images," which are "objectively un-
presentable" (I would call them poetic impres-
sions), but are greater elements compounded of
"representations," whether by montage or sym-
bolic acting or any other means.
4
The whole is
governed by the "initial general image which ori-
ginally hovered before the creative artist"S - the
matrix, the commanding form; and it is this (not, be
it remarked, the artist's emotion) that is to be
evoked in the mind of the spectator.
Yet Eisenstein believed that the beholder of
a film was somewhat specially called on to use
his imagination, to create his own experience of
the story.6 Here we have, I think, an indication
of the powerful illusion the film' makes not of
things going on, but of the dimension in which
they go on - a virtual creative imagination; for it
seems one's own creation, direct visionary experi-
ence, a "dreamt reality." Like most artists, he took
the virtual experience for the most pbvious fact.
7
The fact that a motion picture is not a plastic
work but a poetic presentation accOunts for its
power to assimilate the most diverse materials,
and transform them into- non-pictorial elements.
Like dream, it enthralls and commingles all senses;
its basic abstraction - direct apparition - is made
not only by visual reans, though these are para-
mount, but by words, which punctuate vision, and
music that supports the unity of its shifting
"world." It needs many, often convergent, means
to create the continuity of emotion which holds it
together while its visions roam through space and
time.
It is noteworthy that Eisenstein draws his ma-
terials for discussion from epic rather than dra-
matic poetry; from Pushkin rather than Chekhov,
Milton rather than Shakespeare. That brings us
back to the point noted by my seminar students,
that the novel lends itself more readily to screen
dramatization than the drama. The fact is, I think,
that a story narrated does not require as much
"breaking down" to become screen apparition,
because it has no framework itself of fixed space,
as the stage has; and one of the aesthetic peculiar-
ities of dream, which the moving picture takes
over, is the nature of its space. Dream events are
spatial - often intensely concerned with space -
intervals, endless roads, bottomless canyons,
things too high, too near, too far - but they are
not oriented in any total space. The same is true of
, the moving picture, and distinguishes it - despite
its visual character - from plastic _art: its space
comes and goes. It is always a secondary illusion.
The fact that the film is somehow related to
dream, and is in fact in a similar mode, has been
remarked by several people, sometimes for reasons
Notes
r Messrs Joseph Pattison, Louis Forsdale, William
Hath, and Mrs Virginia E. Allen. Mr Hath is now
Instructor in English at Cortland (New York) State
Teachers College; the other three are members of the
Columbia Teachers College staff.
2 The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (London,
1968), p. 17.
3 Ibid., p. 4.
4 Ibid., p. 8.
5 Ibid., p. 31.
6 Ibid., p. 33: " ... the spectator is drawn into a creative
act in which his individuality is not subordinated to the
author's individuality, but is opened up throughout
the process of fusion with the author's intention, just
as the individuality of a great actor is fused with the
A Note on the Film
artistic, sometimes non-artistic. R. E. Jones noted
its freedom not only from spatial restriction, but
from temporal as well. "Motion pictures," he said,
"are our thoughts made visible and audible. They
flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as
our thoughts do, and their speed, with their flash-
backs - like sudden uprushes of memory - and
their abrupt transition from one subject to an-
other, approximates very closely the speed of our
thinking. They have the rhythm of the thought-
stream and the same uncanny ability to move
forward or backward in space or time .... They
project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner
life."s
The "dreamed reality" on/the screen can move
forward and backward because it is really an eter-
nal and ubiquitous virtual present. The action of
drama goes inexorably forward because it creates a
future, a Destiny; the dream mode is an endless
Now.
individuality of a great playwright in the creation of a
classic scenic image. In fact, every spectator ... creates
an image in accordance with the representational guid-
ance, suggested by the author, leading him to under-
standing and experience of the author's theme. This is
the same iroage that was planned and created by the
author, but this image is at the same time created also
by the spectator himself."
7 Compare the statement in Ernest Lindgren's The Art
of the Film (London, 1948), p. 92, apropos of the
moving camera: "It is the spectator's own mind that
moves."
8 The Dramatic Imagination (New York, 1941), pp.
17-18.